Sometimes the most profound art doesn't hang on a wall—it surrounds you completely, transforms the way you breathe, changes how you see.
That's what happened when I encountered Kimsooja's "To Breathe" in the desert.
I've spent my career thinking about space—how to fill it, how to frame it, how to make it feel expansive or intimate. But standing inside this "bottari of light," I realized I'd been thinking too small.
Here was an artist who didn't just create art to be observed. She created a space to be inhabited. The iridescent glass panels weren't walls—they were filters, transforming ordinary desert light into something magical, something that made you hyperaware of your own presence in the landscape.
We spent over an hour there, not because we needed that long to "see" the piece, but because the piece kept revealing itself differently as the light changed, as we moved, as we breathed. Every few minutes, the installation would catch the sun from a new angle and suddenly the entire space would shift from blue to gold to pink to something that doesn't have a name.
This is what I call "making art with art"—that moment when you stop being a passive observer and become part of the composition. When the boundaries between artist, artwork, and audience dissolve into something larger.
Kimsooja designed this as a performance space, inviting interaction with the essential elements of the desert: the texture of sand underfoot, the air we breathe, the light around us. But what she really created was a meditation on presence itself.
There's something profound about art that asks nothing of you except that you show up. No interpretation required. No art history degree needed. Just your body in space, your lungs taking in air, your eyes adjusting to new spectrums of possibility.
Standing there, I thought about my own work—those dreamscapes I paint that try to capture impossible landscapes, places that exist only in imagination. But here was Kimsooja doing something different: taking a real landscape and making it impossible, transforming the familiar into the fantastical through nothing more than light and perception.
Sometimes the most important art doesn't tell you what to think. It reminds you how to feel.
And in a world that's constantly demanding our attention, pulling us in seventeen directions at once, there's something revolutionary about art that simply asks you to be present. To breathe. To notice the light around you.
That's the kind of art I want to make more of. Not just work that looks beautiful on a wall, but experiences that change how you move through the world after you leave.
What would happen if more of our art functioned like this? Not as decoration or investment or cultural capital, but as invitations to presence, reminders to breathe, spaces where transformation becomes possible?
The desert knows something we've forgotten: that the most profound experiences often happen when we stop trying so hard to make them happen.
Stefanie Bales is an award-winning fine artist, muralist, and owner of Stefanie Bales Fine Art—San Diego's "Best Art Gallery" three years running. After earning her MFA and spending over a decade as an art professor, she now paints full-time from her downtown gallery, creating the kind of surreal dreamscapes that make people stop and wonder if they're looking at the future or remembering a dream. When she's not collaborating with brands like Societea or preparing for her upcoming TEDx talk, she's raising two sons who remind her daily that the best art happens when you're not trying to make art at all. Learn more at stefaniebales.com
